Month: November 2016

As the labor union-backed Fight for $15 begins yet another nationwide strike on November 29, I have a simple message for the protest organizers and the reporters covering them: I told you so.

It brings me no joy to write these words. The push for a $15 starter wage has negatively impacted the career prospects of employees who were just getting started in the workforce while extinguishing the businesses that employed them. I wish it were not so. But it’s important to document these consequences, lest policymakers elsewhere decide that the $15 movement is worth embracing.

Let’s start with automation. In 2013, when the Fight for $15 was still in its growth stage, I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives. At the time, labor groups accused business owners of crying wolf. It turns out the wolf was real.

Earlier this month, McDonald’s announced the nationwide roll-out of touchscreen self-service kiosks. In a video the company released to showcase the new customer experience, it’s striking to see employees who once would have managed a cash register now reduced to monitoring a customer’s choices at an iPad-style kiosk.

It’s not just McDonald’s that has embraced job-replacing technology. Numerous restaurant chains (both quick service and full service) have looked to computer tablets as a solution for rising labor costs that won’t adversely impact the customer’s experience. Eatsa, a fully-automated restaurant concept, now has five locations—all in cities or states that have embraced a $15 minimum wage. And in a scene stolen from The Jetsons, the Starship delivery robot is now navigating the streets of San Francisco with groceries and other consumer goods. The company’s founder pointed to a rising minimum wage as a key factor driving the growth of his automated delivery business.

Of course, not all businesses have the capital necessary to shift from full-service to self-service. And that brings me to my next correct prediction–that a $15 minimum wage would force many small businesses to lay off staff, seek less-costly locations, or close altogether.

Tragically, these stories—in California in particular–are too numerous to cite in detail here. They include a bookstore in Roseville, a pub in Fresno, restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, a coffee shop in Berkeley, grocery stores in Oakland, a grill in Santa Clara, and apparel manufacturers through the state. In September of this year, nearly one-quarter of restaurant closures in the Bay Area cited labor costs as one of the reasons for shutting down operations. And just this past week, a California-based communications firm announced it was moving 75 call center jobs from San Diego to El Paso, citing the state’s rising minimum as the “deciding factor.” (Dozens of additional stories can be found at the website FacesOf15.com.)

Other states are also learning the same basic economic lesson: Customers have a limit to what they will pay for service. Voters in Washington, Colorado, Maine and Arizona voted to raise minimum wages on Election Day, convinced of the policy’s merits after millions of dollars were spent by union advocates. In the immediate aftermath, family-owned restaurants, coffee shops and even childcare providers have struggled to absorb the coming cost increase—with parents paying the cost through steeper childcare bills, and employees paying the cost through reduced shift hours or none at all.

The out-of-state labor groups who funded these initiatives aren’t shedding tears over the consequences. Like their Soviet-era predecessors who foolishly thought they could centrally manage prices and business operations to fit an idealistic worldview, economic reality keeps ruining the model of all gain and no pain. This brings me to my last correct prediction, which is that the Fight for $15 was always more a creation of the left-wing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) rather than a legitimate grassroots effort. Reuters reported last year that, based on federal filings, the SEIU had spent anywhere from $24 million to $50 million on the its Fight for $15 campaign, and the number has surely increased since then.

This money has bought the union a lot of protesters and media coverage. You can expect more of it on November 29. But the real faces of the Fight for $15 are the young people and small business owners who have had their futures compromised. Those faces are not happy ones.

Josefina Sauleda Paulis, of the Dominican cloistered monastery in Barcelona, has also been commended in Catholic sources.

After being captured and interrogated by the Jews and their commie acolytes, and when about to be led away to be executed, she bravely and defiantly said: If you are going to kill me, why don’t you do it right here?

She was martyred and her body was found outside the Hippodrome in Barcelona.

These two martyrs were listed among 731 other Christian martyrs of the Spanish Civil War, beatified by the Roman Catholic Church in 2001 and 2007. In the beatification homily of Bonaventure Garcia Paredes and his companions, Pope Benedict said:

Adding such a great number of martyrs to the list of beatified persons shows that the supreme witness of giving blood is not an exception reserved only to some individuals, but a realistic possibility for all Christian people. It includes men and women of different ages, vocations and social conditions, who pay with their lives in fidelity to Christ and his Church.

Arthur Bryant, in his well-documented “Communist Atrocities in Spain”, tells of one murder squad which went to the Dominican Convent in Barcelona and informed the Mother Superior that “because of possible mob violence” the nuns should accompany the squad to a place of safety. They were then taken to the suburbs and murdered.

Their Jewish leader commented, “We needed the building. We didn’t want to muss it up before we occupied it.”

E.M. Godden, in “Conflict in Spain,” says on p. 72, “During the last week of July, 1936, the bodies of nuns were exhumed from their graves and propped up outside the walls of their convents. Obscene and offensive placards were attached to their bodies.”

In Madrid, it was estimated that one tenth of the population of Spain was murdered by the Communist Jews by 1939. De Fonteriz in “Red Terror in Madrid” tells how Cheka crews organized by Dimitrov and Rosenberg carried out a program of torture and murder so obscene that it cannot be repeated or described.

To further their World Murder Plan, the Jews have occasionally allowed a few of their numbers to be sacrificed. This was brought out at the meeting in Rothschild’s home in 1773, when it was stated, “But it has paid us even though we have sacrificed many of our own people. Each victim on our side is worth a thousand Goyim.”

What the speaker meant was that if one Jew happens to be killed, he will be avenged by the death of one thousand Christians, or “cattle” as the Christians are derisively referred to by the Jewish cult.

The speaker went on to point out to his rapt listeners that “We are interested in just the opposite … in the diminution, the killing out of the Goyim.” The record of this meeting in Rothschild’s house survived how?

Toll on the clergy

In the course of the Jews’ commie Red Terror, 6,832 members of the Catholic clergy, 20% percent of the nation’s clergy, were killed. The figures break down the as follows: Some 283 women religious were killed. Some of them were badly tortured. 13 bishops were killed from the dioceses of Siguenza Lleida, Cuenca, Barbastro, Segorbe, Jaén, Ciudad Real, Almeria, Guadix, Barcelona, Teruel and the auxiliary of Tarragona. Aware of the dangers, they all decided to remain in their cities. I cannot go, only here is my responsibility, whatever may happen, so said the Bishop of Cuenca.

In addition 4,172 diocesan priests, 2,364 monks and friars, among them 259 Claretians, 226 Franciscans, 204 Piarists, 176 Brothers of Mary, 165 Christian Brothers (also called the De La Salle Brothers), 155 Augustinians, 132 Dominicans, and 114 Jesuits were killed. In some dioceses, the number of secular priests killed are overwhelming:

In Barbastro 123 of 140 priests were killed, about 88 percent of the secular clergy were murdered, 66 percent In Lleida, 270 of 410 priests were killed. about 62 percent In Tortosa, 44 percent of the secular priests were killed.

In Toledo 286 of 600 priests were killed. In the dioceses of Málaga, Minorca and Segorbe, about half of the priests were killed”

In 2001 the Catholic Church beatified hundreds of Martyrs of the Spanish Civil War and beatified 498 more on October 28, 2007.

In October 2008, the Spanish newspaper La Razon published an article on the number of people murdered for practicing Catholicism.”

May 1931: 100 church buildings are burned while firefighters refuse to extinguish the flames.

After more than 1,000 women were mugged, sexually assaulted, and raped by migrants last New Year’s Eve, the city of Cologne is considering using helicopters, registering all newcomers, and setting up “women retreats” to keep females safe this year.

The official recommendations were made to police in a report, seen by Cologne’s Expressnewspaper, written by expert police who have analysed theevents at the New Year’s Eve celebrations last year.

“A consistent and comprehensive first-time survey of asylum seekers/refugees at entry is regarded as mandatory for both preventive policing… and investigative inspection,” the report asserts.

The authors say the establishment of “women retreats/security points” should be examined, and police should look to deploy specially trained female sexual offence officers to the streets “in order to carry out qualified questioning and secure objective evidence”.

They also suggest extra “police horses, helicopters, and elevated observation positions” to control the mobs and revellers this year, and much-expanded use of surveillance including “vigorously documenting video surveillance and sufficient light sources”.

Furthermore, the report argues that there must be more work done to integrate immigrants and “improve the basic conditions which result in social-structure disadvantages and frustrations as a result of lack of personal exchange, financial participation, recognition, and barriers to getting to know women.”

During the 2015/16 New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne city centre, hundreds of sexual assaults (including groping and at least five rapes) were reported.

Witnesses described the attackers as “North African or Arab origin”. It later emerged that most suspects came from Algeria, Morocco, or Iraq, that many were claiming asylum in Germany, and 70 per cent of had been in the country for less than a year.

Local media later apologised for ‘covering up’ and initially failing to report on the attacks. Leaked documents and e-mails showed the police were also under pressure to keep quiet about the migrant attacks.